Feeling contaminated? Plastic pipes trump glass bottles.

Think your bottled water is all safe from fake estrogen contamination because you’ve switched to glass bottles? ScienceNews wants you to think again:

…[T]heir data indicate that the mineral water dispensed in some glass bottles may also contain such hormonelike pollution — and not because it leached out of the glass.

…Several scientists now suspect one source might be the plumbing used to move water from natural reservoirs to — and/or through — processing equipment in a bottling plant.

Polyvinyl chloride tubing, for instance, is widely used by industry. So if mineral water were pumped through PVC piping it could pick up bisphenol-A, organotin and phthalates — “because [PVC] is a source of all those,” notes Shanna Swan, an environmental epidemiologist at the University of Rochester School of Medicine and Dentistry.